The Spark and the Drive (31 page)

“Are you okay?” she said, walking slowly toward me.

I found my voice again. “You look really good, Mary Ann.” It was invigorating to say her name, and I breathed deeply.

She smiled, touched my sleeve for only a second before she stepped back and glanced around. “I can’t believe what you accumulate in five years. Not even five years.”

Outside I heard Susan talking to a guy, probably her husband, and the shallow thump as they walked up the aluminum ramp of the moving truck. Slowly, against a fading dizziness, I pushed away from the door. Mary Ann looked up and into my face in an intimate way, touching my arm again, and just as I thought we would kiss she pulled back and went to where she’d been at the counter, and I realized that she’d only been checking that I was well.

She wrote
KITCHEN
on the box with a black Sharpie, and I came up and took the box off the counter. “Just set it by the door,” she said.

She was standing at the doorway to the living room when I turned back around. “Come say hi to Nick,” she said, and I followed her out of the kitchen.

The futon and the recliner and TV were gone from the living room, and a girl of seven or eight was sitting on the floor, listening to music on a Walkman and writing in a
Mad Libs
book. She didn’t look up, and we weren’t introduced. I followed Mary Ann down the hallway to their bedroom. This room had been left alone, and it sickened me when I saw the bed in my peripheral vision as I came up to the wheelchair. Nick was wearing a knit cap, under which I could see that his hair was cut short, just longer than a crew cut, it seemed. His head was tilted back so that he was looking at the picture of himself with Buddy Baker in front of Buddy’s famous Superbird.

Mary Ann wheeled the chair around. “Somebody came to see you, honey,” she said. “This is Justin. He’s your friend.”

His head seemed to be stretched longer, though it could have been the effect of the snug-fitting cap. One of his eyes wandered as if some of its cords had been severed, and there was a dent in his forehead. He’d lost so much weight I could see his jawbones, where the skin went up like the top of a parachute behind his chin, and his lips were very chapped, flecks of yellow skin peeled up like dried wax. I wondered if he’d lost the part of his brain that reminds us to moisten them.

“Hi, Nick,” I said. He smiled gigantically, creasing his face in places that had never been creased before. But I saw through the smile the heavy blanket of the lie. He didn’t recognize me. He had been rewarded for recognizing people in the past, and that’s all this was. A conditioned response, a knee jerk. He panted out two breaths and then looked down at his hand, and the word I thought he was saying was “ate” until his hand started coming up off the blanket on his lap, and I understood he was saying “shake.” And I held his hand, whose strength seemed to be short-circuited, painfully firm between thumb and forefinger and lifeless near the pinkie, the skin as soft and tacky as mine had become. His eyes were dim in the moment before they started darting away.

And where does it go? I had a professor Monday and Wednesday mornings who said that energy cannot be destroyed, so where in the universe does a mind go, a brilliant mind, and can a baby in the womb somehow sponge it up?

Mary Ann walked me out toward Cooke Street.

“We’re leaving tomorrow,” she said. “Nick and I are flying. He couldn’t do a cross-country drive, I don’t think. Susan and Jessie are taking my car, and Frank is driving the truck.”

“I wish I could help,” I said.

She smiled, looking ahead as she slowly walked. “It’s going to be a good life,” she said. She drew her open hands up to the sides of her belly. “We’re just going home.”

“I’m in school,” I said. “Computer science.”

“That’s good. That’s where you belong.”

“Could you send me a picture?” I said. “After he’s born? Him or her.”

Ten feet before the end of the driveway, Mary Ann stopped and turned to me abruptly. “This is his baby,” she said. There was a moment of tightness in her face before she breathed and lifted her thick brows, entering a calmer place. She clasped her hands in front of her belly. “He’s suffered enough for this baby.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I hoped she understood that I meant it for everything.

“Good-bye, Justin,” she said. “Be well.”

“God, it hurts,” I said, the words just suddenly there. She closed her eyes, resisting a moment before she sighed and looked at me again. Then she opened her arms and I stepped into them. I felt the mound of her stomach, both soft and firm somehow, and eased back as if it were the result of an injury, as if it were tender. But she pulled me against it, and I thought I felt something. “Tell us good-bye,” she said, and just for a second I died. Crushing every self-protective impulse, I found my voice and told them.

40.

On the first Sunday of summer break Mom pulled up in front of my apartment, and I loaded in my bike and a week’s worth of clothes while April talked nonstop in her car seat. At home she showed me pictures she’d hung in my room and helped me put away my clothes. “I like your room a lot,” she said. Her face had lost its roundness and she was starting to look like Mom in the nose and eyes. But the dramatic changes were on the inside. She had dry humor and sarcasm now. She was at the stage of planting expressions in every sentence: “No doy.” “Gross me out.” “To the max.” Five years old, she was trying on personalities to see which one fit, much the same as I was. But I had to work at keeping the sense of loss I felt to myself. I wanted, as I imagined parents did, as Mary Ann would one day want for our son, for her to stay uncomplicated and to never be burdened with wanting opposite things at the same time.

I picked up one of her air-filled bouncy balls in the corner. Then we lay side by side on my old bed, and I tossed it up in an easy loop with some back spin. She caught it and threw it too far forward, and I retrieved it, and pretty soon we had a regular back-and-forth, the ball looping a few feet over our bodies as if we were the sing-along words to a song.

“You know what Dad said we could do in the winter?” she said. With my tiny bead of side vision I saw how big her eyes were. “Maybe go
skiing
in
Vermont
.”

“Just maybe?”

“Or probably.”

We threw the ball.

“Tell him Stratton,” I said, “not Bromley. In the lodge they have chocolate-chip cookies as big as your head.”

“Whoa. That’s rad.”

“He probably won’t want to bring you back,” I said. “He told me you’re really, really hard to leave.” I looked at her in between throws, and she was nodding.

“Oh, you knew that?”

“To the max.”

I threw the ball so that it hit off the ceiling and came down so fast she didn’t even get her hands up. It bounced off her chest and came down gently in my hands.

“Do it again,” she said, and this time she caught it and rolled it over to me. “Again,” she said. “Again.”

*   *   *

My mother was seeing someone new, an orthodontist ten years older, who with his patient eyes and caring smiles reminded me more of Don than any of her boyfriends from Levi. While they played Boggle or watched VCR movies in the living room, I’d go in the basement and light the woodstove. It was a cool, wet May, and in the stove’s itching warmth, I’d sip airline bottles from behind the fence, enjoying the half hour to myself.

The fire would hiss and snap, webs of steam lifting from the iron stockpot to a small box fan in the kitchen floor vent that blew the heat up. One of the fan blades was bent or loose, and the soft thump of that imbalance lulled me into my imagination.

We’re together again, Nick and I, in the ZL1, that outrageous promise of a car, as Billy Motts raises the bet money as a flag. With two quick throttle snaps Nick clears the exhaust, and I look at him expecting to see the awareness we both have that the car is unbeatable. But his eyes are wide and ambivalent, as if this time he might have to push the tremendous engine for all it’s worth. I don’t understand, but then I do—he’s freeing himself, if only for these thirteen seconds, from the laws that define him, the certainties of math and physics and even time—which he hoped to undo—and submitting to the proposition that anything can happen. I find myself submitting as well, and for an instant the world has possibilities it will never have again.

Then in a quick lever motion he dumps the clutch and drops the hammer, and for entire seconds the nose of the car lifts skyward, Nick our pilot leading us bravely on that flight from everything we know to untouched infinity, reaches of space and time only dreamed of.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’m deeply grateful to the following people for their advice and edits: Martha Bayless, J. T. Bushnell, John Groves, Betsy Hardinger, Caye Harrison, James Hausman, Andy Kifer, John Larison, Paul Martone, Patricia Moran, Diane McWhorter, Rosalind Trotter, and Jeff Voccola. Thank you to the English Department at Oregon State University for encouragement and support, and to Literary Arts for a generous fellowship. And this book would not have been possible without the tireless efforts of my agent, Seth Fishman, and my editor, Yaniv Soha, two of the very best in the book business.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

WAYNE HARRISON is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop whose stories have appeared in
The Atlantic, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares
, and
Narrative
magazine. One of his stories was selected for
Best American Short Stories 2010
and his fiction has been featured on NPR’s
All Things Considered
. His short story collection
Wrench
was a finalist for the Iowa Book Award, the Serena McDonald Kennedy Award, and the Spokane Prize. He teaches writing at Oregon State University.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

THE SPARK AND THE DRIVE.
Copyright © 2014 by Wayne Harrison. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

Sections of this book have appeared in different forms in
The Atlantic
and
Best American Short Stories 2010.

Cover designed by Rob Grom

Cover photograph by Philipp Nemenz

eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Harrison, Wayne, 1969–

    The spark and the drive / Wayne Harrison.

            pages cm

         ISBN 978-1-250-04124-1 (hardcover)

         ISBN 978-1-4668-3735-5 (e-book)

    I. Title.

    PS3608.A78384S67 2014

    813'.6—dc23

2014000133

e-ISBN 9781466837355

First Edition: July 2014